hardly have been more so, if I had been twenty years of age, distinguished at a Grammar School, and going to Cambridge." In this passage the tone of feeling is unmistakeable; as the boy had suffered from a sense of undeserved humiliation, so did the man feel hurt in his deepest sensibilities whenever he reflected on that evil time. His silence regarding it was the most natural reserve.
In middle age we find Dickens saying about his father that the longer he lived, the better man he thought him. To us the elder Dickens is inevitably Mr. Micawber, and who shall say that he has no affection for that type of genial impecuniosity? To his father, no doubt, the novelist owed the happy temperament which had so large a part in his success; plainly, he owed little more. Of his mother, only one significant fact is recorded, viz. that when at length an opportunity offered for the boy's escape from his drudgery in the blacking warehouse, Mrs. Dickens strongly objected to any such change. An unpleasant topic; enough to recognize, in passing, that this incident certainly was not without its permanent effect on the son's mind.
The two years of childish hardship in London (1822-1824), which have resulted in one of the most picturesque and pathetic
